The call to service.

• Author: Greenblatt, Alan
• Position: Bill Clinton's national service program

Last September, on the South Lawn, President Clinton sported a flashy tie and surrounded himself with young Americans to celebrate the signing of the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993. Not only were the trappings distinctly Clintonian--the president clapping and beaming--but the bill was typical Clinton, too: the right idea, founded on the best of motives, but still coming up disturbingly short of the truest, best reform. "National service," the president exulted, "will remain throughout the life of America not as a series of promises but a series of challenges, across all the generations and all walks of life to help push to rebuild our troubled but wonderful land."

To hear the president tell it, you would think thousands of young people were marching forth to do important work the country needs: teaching, policing, helping out in busy hospitals, nursing homes, and shelters. But read the law and take a hard look at the Clinton pilot projects, and you get the sinking sense that the reality of national service could be very different.

Take the coming Summer of Safety, a lofty three-month project to respond, in the words of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), "to the growing fear of and frustration over the levels of crime and violence in every part of the country." Thirty-five hundred young Americans will get a subsistence wage and $1,000 educational vouchers to take on one of the country's most intractable issues. Problem is, the whole program just lasts the summer, which is hardly enough time to get off the bus, much less defuse fear of violent crime. Not that CNCS would let a national service corps member do anything remotely like police work anyway: Participants can't be involved in making arrests, collecting evidence, or "witnessing criminal incidents which may result in participants being called as witnesses in adjudicatory proceedings." (How CNCS figures a participant will know when or where he might witness a crime is anybody's guess. The Washington bureaucrats apparently think malefactors announce their crimes in advance.)

Of course, when you're talking about 17 to 23-year-olds dropping in for the summer, it's sensible not to put them in assignments too dangerous for them to handle. That's not the trouble. The trouble is that the Clintonite national service people like to pretend they're really doing something when they're actually doing nothing. After all, it can take at least three months just...